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public health
As Trump Turns His Back on Environmental Justice, States and Cities Must Step Up
Local and state cumulative impacts laws can provide needed protections for communities where the federal government is failing, and make fertile ground for future federal progress.
Feb 11, 2026
One year ago, the Trump administration launched an agenda putting polluting corporations over our health, lives, and future. This week marks the anniversary of the first-ever environmental justice executive order, and yet we are left in the wake of dozens of harmful orders from Trump rescinding that very order and more targeting environmental justice. Along with unprecedented health and environmental rollbacks, this administration is forcing our communities to bear the greatest costs. Now, local leadership is essential. Groundbreaking state and local laws are filling gaps, showing what is possible, and building momentum for what’s next.
While the federal government unlawfully claws back lifesaving investments such as billions of dollars of grants to clean up water, remove lead, and create clean energy jobs in disadvantaged communities, they’ve also attacked over 30 environmental protections, including undoing stronger soot pollution regulations, and gutted bedrock laws. These actions will cause environmental justice neighborhoods (communities of color and low income) to suffer major consequences, with even more toxic pollution and growing impacts of climate change—threatening jobs, families, and lives.
Seventy-eight million people of color live with dangerous air pollution, and, in 97% of US counties, Black people have the highest death rates from soot pollution. In 2025, 75% of the US population—255 million people—were exposed to “dangerous, life-threatening” heat. In NYC, Black people represent 50% of heat-related deaths, despite being only 25% of the population.
These outsize health harms are no accident. A history of redlining was followed by a disproportionate amount of pollution being dumped in communities of color's backyards. Cumulative impacts are the result. Put simply, cumulative impacts are the combination of many sources of pollution and pressures in an area creating a multiplying effect. Visit any community of color or low income overloaded with highways, industrial, or chemical facilities—like the South Bronx, Newark, or “Cancer Alley” in Louisiana—and you will experience the soot, smog, heat, toxic fumes, and smells that show what cumulative impacts really are. Cumulative impacts laws can be a solution by checking the amount of polluting facilities in an area before allowing more to be built, ending old loopholes for existing facilities, limiting new pollution, and more.
The time for reimagining and recommitting to our ambition to achieve environmental justice is now.
State laws can inform and complement the creation of federal laws like the Environmental Justice for All Act, introduced by the late Reps. Donald McEachin (D-Va.) and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) in 2020. This act embodies input from communities from across the US, and has the promise of being reintroduced by a new generation of congressional champions, inspired by state progress.
We also need these laws to be backed by strong implementation. It is a key moment in New York as the Department of Environmental Conservation is developing rules to carry out the cumulative impacts law. In New Jersey, their Department of Environmental Protection is issuing its first permit decisions based on the cumulative impacts law. These decisions need to set a precedent to break with business as usual, while implementing the strongest conditions in accordance with the environmental justice law. In both cases, the process to put these laws into action must offer real protections and meaningfully include communities.
The time for reimagining and recommitting to our ambition to achieve environmental justice is now. State and local governments must step up in the face of federal attacks and maintain the momentum that environmental justice communities demand and deserve. In this moment, we need more state and local cumulative impact laws that hold the promise of a long-overdue vision of safe and healthy places to live, work, play, and pray.
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Warnings of 'Permanent' Damage to People and Planet as Trump EPA Set to Repeal Key Climate Rule
One critic blasted the impending move as "an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok."
Feb 10, 2026
In what experts warn would be the most sweeping rollback of US climate policy ever, the Trump administration is expected this week to repeal the Environmental Protection Agency's "endangerment finding," the Obama-era rule empowering climate regulation over the past 15 years.
The endangerment finding determined that six greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—caused by burning fossil fuels are a single air pollutant that threatens public health and welfare, rather than treating each gas individually, for regulatory purposes.
The 2009 finding has served as the legal foundation for EPA climate rules, including limits on power plant emissions and automobile fuel economy standards under the Clean Air Act.
The new rule would end the regulatory requirement to measure and report vehicle emissions, certify the results, and comply with limits. It would also repeal compliance programs and credit provisions.
“This amounts to the largest act of deregulation in the history of the United States,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a Monday interview with the Wall Street Journal.
However, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) warned Tuesday on the upper chamber floor that "this week, the Trump administration is set to take one of its most nakedly corrupt steps since Donald Trump returned to office, and that’s saying a lot: a wholesale reversal of essentially all greenhouse gas regulations."
"Trump is making a radical move that will send shockwaves across the economy—uncertainty for manufacturers, states, regulators everywhere. And it flies in the face, of course, of basic science," Schumer said. "Let's be very clear what this announcement represents: It is a corrupt giveaway to Big Oil, plain and simple."
"Big Oil has worked tirelessly for decades to undermine rules that protect against emissions, and now that they have their guy in the White House, they are taking their biggest swing yet," the senator added. "Remember, in the spring of 2024, Donald Trump invited top oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and told them, if you raise me a billion dollars to get me elected, I will cut regulations so you can make more money. That devil’s bargain is now coming true."
Trump is trying to repeal the "endangerment finding" -- the scientific investigation that led EPA to conclude that climate change is dangerous to humans.It's scientifically unjustifiable of course, but they're going to have to justify it to a court. That should be fun to watch.
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— David Roberts (@volts.wtf) February 10, 2026 at 9:22 AM
Big Oil spent over $445 million to elect Trump and other Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle.
Gretchen Goldman, president and CEO at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), a nonprofit advocacy group, said in a statement Tuesday that “Zeldin took a chainsaw to the endangerment finding, undoing this long-standing, science-based finding on bogus grounds at the expense of our health.”
“Ramming through this unlawful, destructive action at the behest of polluters is an obvious example of what happens when a corrupt administration and fossil fuel interests are allowed to run amok,” Goldman added.
More than 1,000 scientists and other experts have implored EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to not repeal the endangerment finding. In a statement last year, the Environmental Protection Network warned that repealing the finding would result in “tens of thousands of additional premature deaths due to pollution exposure” over the next several decades and spark “accelerated climate destabilization with greater risks of heatwaves, floods, droughts, and disease spread.”
While Trump administration officials told the Journal that the new rules would not apply to regulation of emissions from power plants and oil and gas facilities, some said that repealing the endangerment finding could set the stage for additional rollbacks favoring such polluters.
UCS noted Tuesday that the Trump administration “relied heavily on shoddy science in a report developed by a ‘Climate Working Group,’ composed of five skeptics well outside the scientific mainstream in its proposal to repeal the endangerment finding."
“The report, which was commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE), has been thoroughly discredited by the scientific community, which found that the report ‘misrepresents the state of climate science by cherry-picking evidence, exaggerating uncertainties, and ignoring decades of peer-reviewed research,’” UCS continued.
On January 30, Judge William Young of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, ruled that the DOE violated the law when Energy Secretary Chris Wright—the former CEO of a fracking company who denies there is a climate emergency—handpicked the five researchers for the dubious report.
Republicans have been working toward killing the endangerment finding for years. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for a right-wing overhaul of the federal government, explicitly mentions the rule as ripe for repeal. Project 2025’s policy lead, Russell Vought, now directs Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
OMB Acting Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Jeffrey Clark—a purveyor of the “Big Lie” that Democrats stole the 2020 election—has also been working hard at dismantling federal climate regulations, which he once likened to a “Leninistic” plot to control the US economy.
“Instead of rising to the challenge with necessary policies to protect people’s well-being, the Trump administration has shamefully abandoned EPA’s mission and caved to the whims of deep-pocketed special interests,” Goldman said. “Sacrificing people’s health, safety, and futures for polluters’ profits is unconscionable. We all deserve better and this attack against the public interest and the best available science will be challenged.”
Climate scientist Michael Mann called the campaign to repeal the endangerment finding “a reminder that, while some of the damage that Trump [and the] GOP are doing might seem temporary, the damage they’re doing to the planet is permanent.”
Or, as Cardiff University ecologist Aaron Thierry put it, “You can repeal an endangerment finding. You can’t repeal the endangerment.”
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'Industry Cronies' at Trump's EPA Reapprove Dangerous Pesticide Dicamba
"It’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," said one critic.
Feb 06, 2026
The US Environmental Protection Agency on Friday announced its anticipated reapproval of dicamba for two key crops, a move which, given the pesticide's proven health risks, places the EPA at apparent odds with President Donald Trump's vow to "Make America Healthy Again."
“The industry cronies at the EPA just approved a pesticide that drifts away from application sites for miles and poisons everything it touches,” Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in response to Friday's announcement.
“With the EPA taking aggressive pro-pesticide industry actions like this, it’s hard to see how Making America Healthy Again was anything but another broken campaign promise," Donley added. "When push comes to shove, this administration is willing to bend over backward to appease the pesticide industry, regardless of the consequences to public health or the environment.”
The EPA said in a statement that the agency "established the strongest protections in agency history for over-the-top (OTT) dicamba application on dicamba-tolerant cotton and soybean crops," and that "this decision responds directly to the strong advocacy of America's cotton and soybean farmers."
While scientific studies have linked exposure to high levels of dicamba to increased risk of cancer and hypothyroidism and the European Union has classified dicamba as a category II suspected endocrine disruptor, the EPA said Friday that "when applied according to the new label instructions," it "found no unreasonable risk to human health and the environment from OTT dicamba use."
This is the third time the EPA has approved dicamba for OTT use. On both prior occasions, federal courts blocked the approvals, citing underestimation of the risk of chemical drift that could harm neighboring farms.
The agency highlighted new restrictions on dicamba use it said will reduce risk of drift.
"EPA recognizes that previous drift issues created legitimate concerns, and designed these new label restrictions to directly address them, including cutting the amount of dicamba that can be used annually in half, doubling required safety agents, requiring conservation practices to protect endangered species, and restricting applications during high temperatures when exposure and volatility risks increase," it said.
Critics noted that the EPA during the Biden administration published a report revealing that during Trump’s first term, senior administration officials intentionally excluded scientific evidence of dicamba-related hazards, including the risk of widespread drift damage, prior to a previous reapproval.
Others pointed to the recent appointment of former American Soybean Associate lobbyist and dicamba advocate Kyle Kunkler as the EPA's pesticides chief.
"Kunkler works under two former lobbyists for the American Chemistry Council, Nancy Beck and Lynn Dekleva, who are now overseen by a fourth industry lobbyist, Doug Troutman, who was recently confirmed to lead the chemicals office following endorsement by the chemical council," the Center for Food Safety (CFS) noted Friday.
The Trump EPA has also come under fire for promoting the alleged safety of atrazine, a herbicide that the World Health Organization says probably causes cancer, and for pushing the US Supreme Court to shield Bayer, which makes the likely carcinogenic weedkiller Roundup, from thousands of lawsuits.
CFS science director Bill Freese said that “the Trump administration’s hostility to farmers and rural America knows no bounds."
“Dicamba drift damage threatens farmers’ livelihoods and tears apart rural communities," Freese added. "And these are farmers and communities already reeling from Trump’s [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids on farmworkers, the trade war shutdown of soybean exports to China, and Trump’s bailout of Argentina, whose farmers are selling soybeans to the Chinese—soybeans China used to buy from American growers.”
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